1.) Why did European locomotives not have headlights? Did they lack them since they were unnecessary due to fenced in Right-of-Ways?
2.) Why do the European railways continue to use the hook and chain coupling system even though it seems antiquated compared to the North American Janney Automatic? In a similar vein, why did Austrailia and India gradually make the change along with New Zealand?
3.) To spin question 2 on its head, why didn’t North American railroads use the hook and chain system and develop the link and pin system before switching to the Janney Automatic in use today?
Thank you for your time.
Some European practice does use headlights to see the right of way. German railroads had the ‘triangle’ pattern of white lights that North Americans now use many years ago, precisely because it is a distinctive means of identifying ‘train’ when seen; we just use many more lumens to get the point across.
You are fundamentally correct about the fenced-in ROW, with an added consideration that some British roads prided themselves on local road knowledge to the extent they didn’t think ‘keeping a safe lookout’ with bright headlights was all that important. I remember as a boy reading about heavy fog days with London expresses thundering by several minutes apart, with visibility little more than 15 feet, and wondering how they safely did it. Answer: they presumed they were a great deal safer than they actually were, but ‘adherence to regulations’[ eliminated most of the usual sort of risk North American operation might face under similar conditions…
There are a couple of parts to this. The first is that the ‘buffer’ system got around most of the problems with screw couplings, and that was arrogantly thought superior to the American ‘link and pin’ with thousands and thousands of cheap little links and pins and the need for patent link-flipping tools that ‘real switchmen’ didn’t need or use. The second is that, in many cases, when the European need for better or automatic couplings came in, they had “better” alternatives t